🔧 Useful

The carbon intensity of the grid across most of the world, coloured by how clean each country's electricity happens to be at this minute.

Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.

Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.

Every emoji with its meaning, its history and how it renders on each platform. Settles arguments in one link.

The professional encyclopedia, still going, and a useful second opinion whenever Wikipedia gets contested.

A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.

Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.

Slide across a stack of time zones and see the hour for everyone at once. The quickest way to find a meeting slot that spans continents.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.

Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.

Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.

An internet speed test that starts the moment the page opens and shows one big number. Tap for upload speed and latency if you want more.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.

Searches the web for actual sound files by keyword, in a layout untouched since roughly 2003. Still the fastest route to a duck quack.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

A preservation project that has rescued more than a hundred thousand Flash games and animations from deletion, all playable.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.

Animated bar chart races, scrollytelling and story maps built from a spreadsheet without writing any code.

Books you a silent video call with a stranger who also needs to work, which turns out to be startlingly effective.

Variable font sandbox where you drag the axes and watch weight, width and optical size move in real time.

Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

Native speakers pronouncing individual words in hundreds of languages, for when a phonetic spelling is not enough.

Properly licensed free downloads curated by radio stations, which is how you stop losing your videos to copyright claims.

A long, community-kept list of software and services with genuinely free tiers: hosting, databases, email, monitoring and much more.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

A directory of AI tools with categories, pricing filters and short reviews, handy for finding a free option for a specific job.

A shelf of room-code party games — spy, drawing, word association, trivia — all free, all in one place, none needing an app.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.

Curated wall of the best-designed sites on the internet, filterable by type and updated relentlessly.

Good news with a nudge attached — every story arrives alongside something you could actually do about it.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.

A weekly, hand-picked digest of the best Hacker News links, with an archive of past issues you can browse straight from the site.

Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.